I wish to share with you selected passages from the book ‘Self-unfoldment by Disciplines of Realization’ written by Manly P. Hall.

This book contains many wise lessons and practical instructions on how we can penetrate deep within ourselves so to understand the Truth of who we are, and how we fit into this universal existence.

The ultimate aim is to attain the self-knowledge for us to grow effortlessly towards wisdom and a blessed life.

I am still in the process of reading this fascinating book, and will endeavor to post more enlightening and insightful passages as I go along.

From ‘Chapter 1 – Theory of Disciplines’:

Metaphysical disciplines are not to be regarded as competitive exercises in which one vies with another in the magnitude of his imaginings, or yearns toward some metaphysical aristocracy. All metaphysical exercises worthy of the NAME are an unfolding of self into the light of virtue, beauty, and wisdom. The illustration for this lesson is taken from the Zen school of Chinese art. It is the “lone traveler,” a solitary monk standing on the edge of a great cliff gazing out into the mist. Far beyond rise dimly the shadows of high mountains in the ageless contrast to gnarled and broken trees in the foreground. Much has been said of the loneliness of wisdom, and how much the Truth seeker becomes a pilgrim wandering from start to star. To the ignorant, the wise man is lonely because he abides in distant heights of the mind. But the wise man himself does not feel lonely. Wisdom brings him nearer to life; closer to the heart of the world than the foolish man can ever be. Bookishness may lead to loneliness, and scholarship may end in a battle of beliefs, but the wise man gazing off into space sees not an emptiness, but a space full of life, truth, and law.

The Truth-Seeker’s lonely mission is to:

turn off the TV and radio

dispose of the newspapers

question everything you have been told and taught to be true

inquire for yourself to discern what the truth may be – in other words, educate yourselves

Seek and gain the practical and beneficial knowledge that can actually help you to become conscious beings, self-reliant, self-determined, pragmatic and wise

Look within yourselves for the true answers towards achieving your aims in life – the truth and wisdom is within you to use to your advantage

Take responsibility for your own health, income, and general well-being

Stone Age man created a massive network of underground tunnels criss-crossing Europe from Scotland to Turkey, a new book on the ancient superhighways has claimed.

German archaeologist Dr Heinrich Kusch said evidence of the tunnels has been found under hundreds of Neolithic settlements all over the continent.

In his book – Secrets Of The Underground Door To An Ancient World – he claims the fact that so many have survived after 12,000 years shows that the original tunnel network must have been enormous.

‘In Bavaria in Germany alone we have found 700metres of these underground tunnel networks. In Styria in Austria we have found 350metres,’ he said.

‘They are interspersed with nooks, at some places it’s larger and there is seating, or storage chambers and rooms.

‘They do not all link up but taken together it is a massive underground network.’

Some experts believe the network was a way of protecting man from predators while others believe that some of the linked tunnels were used like motorways are today, for people to travel safely regardless of wars or violence or even weather above ground.

The book notes that chapels were often built by the entrances perhaps because the Church were afraid of the heathen legacy the tunnels might have represented, and wanted to negate their influence.

In some cases writings have been discovered referring to the tunnels seen as a gateway to the underworld.

I’ve always found controlling my dreams to be fairly easy. I played my dreams like a lute, each string its own dimension, every note a new shade to color my astral canvas for me to escape into. Meeting any kind of adversary in a dream was never a threat to me, as I could control the outcome of any situation I didn’t approve of, even if it was a dream I hadn’t consciously initiated myself.

One recent example of this, I was roaming some ancient looking castle ruins on a wooded hillside at night. After climbing to the top of a large crumbling tower, I encountered a dark sorceress. I could tell she wasn’t too pleased to see me there as she gave me a wicked scowl and promptly began hurling spells at me. I reacted instinctively by raising my arms to shield myself, but found it was unnecessary since the sooty orbs she was lobbing were exploding harmlessly around me creating a spectral colored light show.

Even though initially I had flinched in defense, I realized that I wasn’t scared of the sorceress. That even though she seemed powerful and menacing, I knew that there was nothing she could do to hurt me. She was an illusion conjured up by my lower self. That’s the moment I realized I was dreaming. My face went from a mask of confusion to a smirk of slyness. The sorceress raised an eyebrow of concern, but before I could make a move I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs behind me. I turned to look and standing at the top step was a little girl, 11 or 12 maybe, with jet black hair wearing a ninja outfit. She had large gold cat eyes and razor sharp claws instead of fingers. She flew through the air towards me and unleashed a storm of kicks and swats from her claw-hands.

I ducked and dodged her attacks, then remembering the sorceress encounter, I stopped and just stood there. Her blows were landing, but just like with the sorceress, nothing was affecting me. No pain, no bruises or claw marks, nothing. That didn’t seem to stop this girl from trying though, just kept at it. I held my hand out with my fingers closed and palm forward towards her yelling, “Stop!” The air shimmered between us like a mirage on a summer road. Her body was repelled back to the other end of the tower where she managed to land on her feet with a stumble, almost falling off the edge. Surprised but still determined, she began making a dash towards me. I was getting annoyed by this point and I decided that I had to get rid of this little girl, not to harm her in any way, just banish her from my sight. I touched the tips of my fingers together with my palms apart and closed my eyes in meditation. The dream view switched from first-person perspective to an aerial view just over the tower. Time appeared to slow down, because the girl was running at me in slow motion from twelve-o’clock and the dark sorceress was at four-o’clock just over my right shoulder dead still.

What happened next is a little difficult to describe. I shape shifted into what looked like a troll. Greenish-brown skin, large ears, big warty nose, but I didn’t grow in size, I remained my normal height of about six feet. I opened my eyes, bent over and reached down at the stone floor and pulled up a transparent mesh which I shook vigorously like a carpet. This caused a wave of force to ripple in the girl’s direction, halting her mid-dash. A portal the color of tropical blue water opened just behind her in the shape of a rectangular doorway. Another swift shake of this gossamer carpet sent her tumbling back into the portal door to elsewhere, which promptly sealed itself shut with a crack of thunder. Now in first-person, time restored to a normal clock rhythm, I turn and shift my icy blue-eyed gaze upon the dark sorceress. She stepped back with a hiss snatching up the hem of her tattered black robes, spun once like a windy wisp of autumn leaves and turned into a giant black moth to fly off into the moon-lit night with ink blot clouds.

I awoke in a mild sweat to the sound of rain rapping against the bedroom window. I’ve just had a lucid dream.

In a newly published study, physicists take singularity out of black holes, suggesting that black holes could serve as portals.

LSU physicist and Center for Computation and Technology researcher Jorge Pullin and his colleague Rodolfo Gambini of the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, have published a study applying Loop Quantum Gravity to an individual black hole, showing that singularities – or the infinite strengthening of the gravitational field that occurs deep within a black hole, insuring the annihilation of anything entering – may not be encountered. Instead, their model shows that gravity would eventually change, suggesting that the “other end” of a black hole might take one to another location within our own universe.

Apply a quantum theory of gravity to black holes and the all-crushing singularity at their core disappears.

In its place is something that looks a lot like an entry point to another universe. Most immediately, that could help resolve the nagging information loss paradox that dogs black holes.

Though no human is likely to fall into a black hole anytime soon, imagining what would happen if they did is a great way to probe some of the biggest mysteries in the universe. Most recently this has led to something known as the black hole firewall paradox – but black holes have long been a source of cosmic puzzles.

According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, if a black hole swallows you, your chances of survival are nil. You’ll first be torn apart by the black hole’s tidal forces, a process whimsically named spaghettification.

Eventually, you’ll reach the singularity, where the gravitational field is infinitely strong. At that point, you’ll be crushed to an infinite density. Unfortunately, general relativity provides no basis for working out what happens next. “When you reach the singularity in general relativity, physics just stops, the equations break down,” says Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University.

The same problem crops up when trying to explain the big bang, which is thought to have started with a singularity. So in 2006, Ashtekar and colleagues applied loop quantum gravity to the birth of the universe. LQG combines general relativity with quantum mechanics and defines space-time as a web of indivisible chunks of about 10-35 meters in size. The team found that as they rewound time in an LQG universe, they reached the big bang, but no singularity – instead they crossed a “quantum bridge” into another older universe. This is the basis for the “big bounce” theory of our universe’s origins.

World Bank conspiracies of massive corruption are discussed with under-fire whistleblower Karen Hudes. She discusses how she has been charged with trespassing from Eric Holder, and how the executive directors of the World Bank were blackmailed in a prostitution scandal from the same bordello Eliot Spitzer frequented.

A suite of disquieting global phenomena have given rise to the “Anthropocene,” a term coined for a new geologic epoch characterized by humanity’s growing dominance of the Earth’s environment and a planetary transformation as profound as the last epoch-defining event — the retreat of the glaciers 11,500 years ago.

And in Bonn, Germany May 21-24, world experts will experts will focus on how to mitigate key factors contributing to extreme damage to the global water system being caused while adapting to the new reality.

“The list of human activities and their impact on the water systems of Planet Earth is long and important,” Anik Bhaduri, Executive Officer of the Global Water System Project (GWSP).

“We have altered the Earth’s climatology and chemistry, its snow cover, permafrost, sea and glacial ice extent and ocean volume—all fundamental elements of the hydrological cycle. We have accelerated major processes like erosion, applied massive quantities of nitrogen that leaks from soil to ground and surface waters and, sometimes, literally siphoned all water from rivers, emptying them for human uses before they reach the ocean. We have diverted vast amounts of freshwater to harness fossil energy, dammed major waterways, and destroyed aquatic ecosystems.”

“The idea of the Anthropocene underscores the point that human activities and their impacts have global significance for the future of all living species — ours included. Humans are changing the character of the world water system in significant ways with inadequate knowledge of the system and the consequences of changes being imposed. From a research position, human-water interactions must be viewed as a continuum and a coupled system, requiring interdisciplinary inquiry like that which has characterized the GWSP since its inception.”

Among many examples of humanity’s oversized imprint on the world, cited in a paper by James Syvitski, Chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and three fellow experts (in full: http://bit.ly/Yx4COp), and in a new “Water in the Anthropocene” video to debut in Bonn May 21 (available at gwsp.org and http://www.anthropocene.info):

Humanity uses an area the size of South America to grow its crops and an area the size of Africa for raising livestock

Due to groundwater and hydrocarbon pumping in low lying coastal areas, two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking, some of them at a rate four times faster on average than global sea level is rising

More rock and sediment is now moved by human activities such as shoreline in-filling, damming and mining than by the natural erosive forces of ice, wind and water combined

Many river floods today have links to human activities, including the Indus flood of 2010 (which killed 2,000 people), and the Bangkok flood of 2011 (815 deaths)

On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years. Tens of thousands of large dams now distort natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia

Drainage of wetlands destroys their capacity to ease floods—a free service of nature expensive to replace

Evaporation from poorly-managed irrigation renders many of the world’s rivers dry — no water, no life. And so, little by little, tens of thousands of species edge closer to extinction every day.

In the early 1970s, David J. Gross exposed the hidden structure of the atomic nucleus. He helped to reinvent string theory in the 1980s. In 2004, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. And today he struggles mightily to describe the basic forces of nature at the Planck scale (billions of times smaller than a proton), where, string theorists hope, the equations of gravity and quantum mechanics mesh.

Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek were awarded the Nobel for discovering asymptotic freedom, more colloquially known as the strong force that binds the components of the atomic nucleus, the protons and neutrons. Forty years ago, their counterintuitive calculations plugged an important gap in the Standard Model of physics, which describes the 61 known elementary particles. This theoretical work revitalized the nearly moribund quantum field theory and gave birth to QCD (quantum chromodynamics), the theory of the strong interactions.

These days, Gross enjoys challenging young physicists as they chalk equations at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the think tank funded by the National Science Foundation that he ran from 1997 until stepping down last year. He is eager for younger scientists to surpass his achievements, to break the impasse of under-determination that currently troubles particle physics, whereby competing theories predict the same physical results and may therefore be immune to experimental verification within the lifetime of the universe.

Gross characterizes theoretical physics as rife with esoteric speculations, a strange superposition of practical robustness and theoretical confusion. He has problems with the popularizing of “multiverses” and “landscapes” of infinite worlds, which are held up as emblematic of physical reality. Sometimes, he says, science is just plain stuck until new data, or a revolutionary idea, busts the status quo. But he is optimistic: Experience tells him that objects that once could not be directly observed, such as quarks and gluons, can be proven to exist. Someday, perhaps the same will be true for the ideas of strings and branes and the holographic boundaries that foreshadow the future of physics.

Wired is reporting that the founder of Liberty Reserve has been indicted on $6 Billion money-laundering charges.

Dubbed the “financial hub of the cyber-crime world,” authorities say Liberty Reserve had more than 1 million users worldwide and processed more than 12 million transactions annually as the favored money-laundering service for carders, hackers and other cybercriminals in the digital underground who used it to transfer money around the world effortlessly and anonymously.

Prosecutors are calling it the largest international money-laundering case ever prosecuted. The LR virtual currency is one of the world’s most widely used. It’s also the first instance of the US government using the Patriot Act to go after virtual currencies.

Authorities arrested founder Arthur Budovsky in Spain last Friday, along with others in Costa Rica and New York.

The Associated Press reports that Costa Rican police have also raided three homes and five businesses linked to Liberty Reserve. Authorities seized the company’s domain name, replacing its home page with a message letting visitors know that the United States Global Illicit Financial Team was in possession of the domain.

So far it appears Budovsky’s crimes are operating a site which criminals use to launder money and failing to register in the U.S. as a money-transmitting service.

To use Liberty Reserve, participants only had to provide a name, birth date and valid email address. It used a virtual currency called the LR. Transactions were anonymous and easily accessible. The site was apparently used by the criminals who recently perpetrated a $45 million coordinated bank heist.

The New York Times quotes prosecutors describing the case as significant “because it attacks the financial infrastructure used by many cybercriminals in much the same way that drug-money-laundering prosecutions unravel the financial underpinnings of the narcotics trade.”

BusinessWeek describes the case as “a series of firsts for U.S. authorities.”

In addition to being the largest international money-laundering case brought by the Justice Department, it involved the first search warrant executed by American officials against a cloud-based server. Bharara said 30 search warrants were executed during an 18-month investigation.

And it’s the first use of U.S. Patriot Act provisions against a digital currency exchange. The Treasury claims that the Patriot Act offers agencies a range of options to protect the U.S. financial system from money laundering. These apparently include targeting businesses that are incorporated outside the United States, as Liberty Reserve is. Its founder, Ukrainian-born, Costa Rican citizen Arthur Budovsky renounced his US citizenship in 2011. It also means that the US government can prevent other financial institutions from interacting with a cyber currency without any convictions.